Nothing New

Rating: 4/10 (25 July 2005)

Michael Bay is a great TV commercial director. He keeps the camera moving, putting lovely models in front of glitzy backdrops. I wouldn't quite go as far as saying Michael Bay is a good action movie director. Action movies get energy from quick cuts and a moving camera, but there needs to be a coherency to all the mayhem. This film feels like retread all the way. "The Island" is a remake of "Logan's Run" in the Blade Runner-esquire Los Angeles (but now with sunny skies!). I like Ewan McGregor sure, but he's not given enough depth to create any attachment. Ditto for Johansson the Airhead, For some of the machinations of the plot to succeed, not only did the logic of the story get dumbed down, but so did our main characters. Once again, great for a 30 second spot to sell a car, but not workable in a 2 hour timeframe.
So it's going through the motions of the discovery that we can easily guess. There are a couple nice set pieces when we see the whole cloning technology, and implanting memories. My hopes were on something slick and well staged when all the whizzing cars and explosions took over in the third act, but it was so bad as to be goofy. Ladies and Gentlemen, you are reduced to big loud signs planted on nearby Holograph Generators, with dozens of Danger and Hazardous signs. And just in case you STILL don't get the big explosion coming up, you have a "Do Not Press This Button - Generator Will Be Destroyed" sign plastered right on the machine. This deflated the whole works to the level of the old Batman TV Shows. But Bay had to tame his vision to under 120 million, and you see the difference when compared to the meta-blockbusters of "Armageddon" (200M) and "Pearl Harbor" (140+M). You get a ridiculous 'action' scene where our heroes slide down alongside a stairway, made all exciting by simply shaking the camera back and forth. I think the shaky cam is way overdone these days, (see my review of "Bourne Supremacy"). This is ultimately what kills the movie, all the action scenes are pure hokum. The CGI air cycles you couldn't buy for a second. The car chase scenes had no direction, it was just aimless cars flipping and exploding ad nauseam. Once again, I am willing to credit Michael Bay's previous films, putting some huge action pieces on the screen. I will still pull out my cable copy of "Pearl Harbor" once in a while and fast forward to the attack scenes.
So that's it, a medium budget sci-fi retread with no A-list actors and nothing really new to offer. You can only hold our attention so long with flashing lights and spastic camera-work, until the thin plot makes you groan. More groans abound as you see commercial logos parade in front of the camera every ten minutes or so. My guess is that Bay was going after the quintessential "Blade Runner" future world Christopher Nolan was also going after in "Batman Begins". But there was no striking vision in this future world, and instead he created a mish-mosh of today, near future, and manufactured future that fails to excite. These is no resonance of a deeper philosophy, which comes belated and through the most unbelievable bad-guy-turns-good moment. Truthfully, "Revenge of the Sith" stands as the most spectacular CGI effect film of all time, and nothing released this summer will measure up in that respect (although McGregor is allowed to expand his acting talents a bit).